Infinite Loop —

Meet the the developer behind Condé Nast’s iOS apps

Condé Nast may be a huge corporation, but a very small team has been hard at …

Author's note: What you are about to read is an interview with a developer who works for Ars Technica's parent company Condé Nast. The interview was my idea and I approached this developer (and the company) about doing it, not the other way around. We here at Ars think that the iOS development team within Condé is made up of some pretty cool folks that most people never get to hear about, which is why I wanted to do this interview. Aside from discussions within Ars, there has been no editorial input from anyone at Condé Nast about the content of this interview.

If you're not a writer or editor for one of Condé Nast's famed publications, it's easy to get lost inside the publishing giant. One unsung hero who labors behind the scenes is Robert "Tolar" Haining, an Ars reader and Technical Architect who has been instrumental in bringing Condé's offerings to the iPhone and iPad. "The first app I ever worked on was Epicurious, but the original was just a rudimentary version that I wrote on my own time back in 2008," Haining told Ars. "At the time, we were working on Facebook apps, so I wrote the Epicurious iOS prototype in the meantime just to show it could be done, and suddenly the ball got rolling."

Haining and his team released the first Wired product review app (no longer available on the App Store) as well as the non-prototype version of the Epicurious app (a personal favorite of mine) and the Concierge postcard app before delving into the magazine apps that we have become familiar with. "We started with the GQ single-issue iPhone app, rolled it into a monthly model, then built the iPad app for GQ that launched along with Epicurious," Haining said. "Then we turned that into a platform that we ended up using on the other magazines as well.

"The GQ editorial and design staff was very involved with the core ideas on how people read magazines and how we should convert this 8.5-inch magazine to a 4.5-inch screen," Haining added. "The staff behind Vanity Fair and Glamour were also involved in their app designs. It was helpful to work with them because they know how their audiences want to read." (Nota bene: Haining did not develop the Ars or Reddit iOS apps, though he is quite familiar with them.)

Haining's newest project through Condé Nast is Idea Flight, an iPad app launched just in time for the kickoff of this year's WWDC. The app offers a way to deliver presentations to a group of people without the need for a projector, should one not be available or you only have a lame one that can wash out your presentations. The client ("passenger") version of the iPad app is free on the App Store, and the "pilot" version (which allows you to open and send your own presentation to the other client apps) is a one-time $8 purchase through Apple's in-app purchasing system.

"You can have high-resolution images and the high quality of an iPad, but still maintain the control you would've had doing a normal presentation," Haining told Ars. "It also saves you the hassle of having to hand out copy decks. For example, when we use it internally, our designers might work on another iteration of a presentation at the last minute and have to print out another hundred-page deck for everyone. So it helps to cut down on some of the wasteful prep time that can go into a presentation. Idea Flight is also good for small things like agendas and other documents."

Idea Flight is unique for Haining because it's the first app that wasn't created as a branded add-on to the company's existing publications. "A lot of people were surprised that a company like Condé would build Idea Flight; it has nothing to do with existing content and it's an entirely new app," Haining said. "Myself, product manager Chris Gonzales, and associate art director Don Eschenauer were put together as a small team who had been doing innovative things in mobile over the last year or two, and we tried to see if there were new products that might not fit into the traditional revenue streams of Condé Nast." (Senior Director of Marketing & Product Development Juliana Stock has also been instrumental in bringing Condé's offerings to the iPad.)

Like most developers who work within large companies, though, Haining and team have faced their fair share of obstacles. "Originally the challenge was convincing people we could build iPhone apps in-house. The first app that Condé Nast produced was the Style.com app, which was outsourced and then later brought in-house," Haining said. "Now, most of our concerns are over budgets and costs when it comes to building and maintaining new apps."

Still, like most other developers we spoke to at WWDC, Haining is looking forward to experimenting with some of Apple's newest iOS features and APIs for use within Condé's own apps. "I'm particularly excited to explore iCloud and possibly integrate it into Idea Flight, since it lends itself well to documents in your app and support in the cloud," he said.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

It worked nicely, given that your comment had nothing to do with the content of the article.

He has a fair point concerning content, like ars, which links heavily to the outside world.

Switching between the two is often cumbersome (especially when the in app browser doesn't behave as you would desire).

I find this quite a bit with Reeder on the iPad, it does however cache the first page of content for rss feeds so it has benefit being inside the walled garden away from the internet. switching too/from safari is just a bit painful (especially with mobile safari's idiotic 'wipe any form input on memory pressure' behavior.

Ask him to re-write your ipad (Ars Technica) app. Cause it's terrible. The average rating for your app is 2 stars. I have download every version. But was disappointed every time. The last time prompted me to not renew my subscription.

Read some of the reviews. If a tech journal can't do a decent ipad app, it's time to hide your heads in shame.

Ask him to re-write your ipad (Ars Technica) app. Cause it's terrible. The average rating for your app is 2 stars. I have download every version. But was disappointed every time. The last time prompted me to not renew my subscription.

Read some of the reviews. If a tech journal can't do a decent ipad app, it's time to hide your heads in shame.

Hey I wrote that! I've yet to feel shame, but I do feel that the need for that App is slowly dwindling. It was always kind of an experiment to see what we could do with our extremely limited resources here, and Apple last week announced even more reasons for people to not use apps like ours. Stuff like Reader built into mobile safari takes away much of our impetus.

Anyway, I have a update for that thing that should be going out today, let me know if you find it to be any better

Ask him to re-write your ipad (Ars Technica) app. Cause it's terrible. The average rating for your app is 2 stars. I have download every version. But was disappointed every time. The last time prompted me to not renew my subscription.

Read some of the reviews. If a tech journal can't do a decent ipad app, it's time to hide your heads in shame.

Hey I wrote that! I've yet to feel shame, but I do feel that the need for that App is slowly dwindling. It was always kind of an experiment to see what we could do with our extremely limited resources here, and Apple last week announced even more reasons for people to not use apps like ours. Stuff like Reader built into mobile safari takes away much of our impetus.

Anyway, I have a update for that thing that should be going out today, let me know if you find it to be any better

Dude. I just want to tell you that I love how well you took that criticism.

Sadly, I have nothing to add to the discussion on topic. I hope you'll forgive me for that.

Edit: With how much I love the Ars staff, I really should become a Premier Subscriber, just to show my support. I think I'll do that soon.

Idea Flight seems like an interesting idea, although it doesn't currently meet my needs (you can't zoom in on a PDF for example). $8 for something like that is perfectly reasonable in my book.

That said, my enjoyment of Condé Nast's apps in general is more than a little lacking. They often feel laggy, and not at all app-like. I'm glad they're trying to do something different with IF, and I'm looking forward to more such efforts.

Speaking purely as a consumer, and not someone sitting in that opening photograph at an incredibly awkward angle, I was pretty happy when GQ subscribers were able to get the iPad issues for free. It's not the same experience for me as reading the magazine on paper, in most ways it's maybe not quite as nice (the screen size and clarity are mostly to blame for that) but there are ways that are pretty handy. I know that several times already when I've wanted to reference something I reached for my iPad rather than flip through the paper version.

I tend to agree with Clint in regards to our app, and I'll leave it at that.

I had just met Tolar finally in person prior to that photo, he's good peoples. I can honestly say that I've been super impressed with the caliber of all the people I've met at Condé since the acquisition. It's public knowledge now that Ars could have been sold for more money to another company, but that Condé was chosen because of the better fit for us, and that's really turned out to be true.

Ask him to re-write your ipad (Ars Technica) app. Cause it's terrible. The average rating for your app is 2 stars. I have download every version. But was disappointed every time. The last time prompted me to not renew my subscription.

Read some of the reviews. If a tech journal can't do a decent ipad app, it's time to hide your heads in shame.

Hey I wrote that! I've yet to feel shame, but I do feel that the need for that App is slowly dwindling. It was always kind of an experiment to see what we could do with our extremely limited resources here, and Apple last week announced even more reasons for people to not use apps like ours. Stuff like Reader built into mobile safari takes away much of our impetus.

Anyway, I have a update for that thing that should be going out today, let me know if you find it to be any better

Glad to see you own it.

Frankly, if I were a journal I would not bother writing an native ipad app. I'd do what the Financial Times did and write it in html5/css3.

Speaking purely as a consumer, and not someone sitting in that opening photograph at an incredibly awkward angle, I was pretty happy when GQ subscribers were able to get the iPad issues for free. It's not the same experience for me as reading the magazine on paper, in most ways it's maybe not quite as nice (the screen size and clarity are mostly to blame for that) but there are ways that are pretty handy. I know that several times already when I've wanted to reference something I reached for my iPad rather than flip through the paper version.

I tend to agree with Clint in regards to our app, and I'll leave it at that.

I had just met Tolar finally in person prior to that photo, he's good peoples. I can honestly say that I've been super impressed with the caliber of all the people I've met at Condé since the acquisition. It's public knowledge now that Ars could have been sold for more money to another company, but that Condé was chosen because of the better fit for us, and that's really turned out to be true.

Congrats. But... now that you have been acquired by Conde Nast, does that mean we can no longer use words like "fuck" in the comments section?

Ask him to re-write your ipad (Ars Technica) app. Cause it's terrible. The average rating for your app is 2 stars. I have download every version. But was disappointed every time. The last time prompted me to not renew my subscription.

Read some of the reviews. If a tech journal can't do a decent ipad app, it's time to hide your heads in shame.

Exactly. This is where the quality of Ars has come down to nowadays. We'll put up an article on the *front page* AND it's an article where we interview ourselves. This is self-promotion and self inflating and done without the least bit of thought as to perception. And don't point me to that little disclaimer at the beginner that Jacqui wrote, because it supposes that most or all of your readers are morons. Navel-gazing without the benefit and a lack of humility slammed together in the same article. Tack on a disclaimer at the beginning stating that only one person thought it up as an after thought, because the editor probably had a little sense of propriety. Just not enough to cut it altogether. Can you imagine the Chicago Tribune doing this? Or any news publication? I didn't think so.